Best of the Blogs: Internet Liberation Roundup
by The Editors
January 19th, 2006
As can be expected from any Internet meditation on the Internet, Jaron Lanier’s lead essay, and the following commentary, has sparked a great deal of online discussion. Here’s some of the best of the blogs.
Dave Manheim of Metapseudointellectualism embarks upon an entertaining, multi-perspectival (i.e., difficult to excerpt) reflection on the ideas of lock-in and brittleness that includes, among other worthwhile thoughts, this gem:
[M]aybe [Lanier's] points about the brittleness of software are true. Maybe software cannot be made so that it adapts well to changes. A “point mutation” in a piece of perl code, for instance, is of course disastrous. More to the point, computers crash. They lose data, they freeze, they simply stop turning on. This is a typical experience with modern computers. As the joke has it, if cars were made by IBM, they would go 5000 Miles an hour, get a hundred thousand miles to the gallon, and explode once a week, killing everybody in a ten foot radius. This, of course, is the hazard of thinking that cars are built like computers. Cars, as unsafe as they may be, are not allowed to explode. It doesn’t really matter if a user-PC crashes. Of course, if you run life-or death software, you shouldn’t run Windows. I’ll never forget seeing for the first time the warning in the Windows 95 EULA that it is not to be used for life support equipment, or nuclear failsafes.
At Digital Crusader, Eric Boyd conjectures that brittle systems may evolve to evolve and thereby transcend their fragility:
I guess I’d sum up my gut feelings against Lanier’s view as being related to Moore’s Law and the progression to more and more powerful tools acting at higher and higher levels. Once a machine gets big enough, it can start to take over the task of maintaining it’s own brittleness - a task which is comparable to DNA’s repair mechanisms, the immune system, or the redundancy (same as Lanier’s “ambiguity”) of language as processed by educated humans. As computers and their associated “code-systems” grow in scale, we can expect them to pass through stages that make them more like the other, natural, examples of evolving digital systems.
On the economic front, Lynne Kiesling of Knowledge Problem demurs at Lanier’s use of “natural monopoly”:
Just because of the network benefits and associated lock-in that can arise with information technologies, that does not necessarily mean that we will suffer the economic efficiency consequences of deadweight loss from a “natural monopolist” behaving like a monopolist.
Here’s what I mean: contestability can keep these “antigoras” from generating deadweight loss, even if the actual competitive alternatives seem weak. Lanier notes that these network benefits from using Microsoft products outweigh the hassle. If Microsoft were truly a “natural monopoly” (if such a thing exists), it would not have to pay attention to what is going on with Linux or Mac or anything else. But the truth is that it does, and that the threat of those alternatives changes its strategy space, and thus its behavior. When that is the environment, when the threat of competition induces a market leader to change its behavior in ways that are inconsistent with monopoly pricing, can you really call that a natural monopoly? I say no, and that even though Linux and Macintosh have small market shares relative to Microsoft, they still serve to change the strategy space and the behavior of Microsoft in ways that benefit consumers. Thus not a “natural monopoly”.
Speaking of markets, Lanier’s essay prompted Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation to outline his intriguing “Hypothesis of Netarchical Capitalism“:
Knowledge and other workers using participatory platforms will generally use both the commons and the market, the latter in order to make a living, and forms of distributed capitalism, which lessen their dependence on the larger firms and the salary dependence, may appeal to them. Such workers do have access to their own information machines, but need platforms to connect. Obviously they are drawn to the participatory platforms devised by these new types of companies, even feeling an allegiance to them. At the same time, the relationship is uneasy since these firms will generally try to evolve towards monopolistic practices, or at least, towards short-term for-profit strategies and tactics which may not be in their interests. Knowledge workers and other forces creating the P2P commons can take a variety of roles in the economy, and in present circumstances clearly need a market, but which they are trying to mold to their own interest. Thus the new forms of distributed capitalism are needed and supported because it lessens the dependence on classic firms and monopolies. The trend fulfills a desire for ‘autonomy within the market,’ and allows for various forms of ‘consumer aggregation’ that were hitherto difficult to achieve.
And last, but by no means least, the comment thread at Slashdot, while largely ill-tempered, contains a number of thoughtful comments, including those in this thread, kicked off by “Animats” on the “file” as the basis of the operating system, and in this thread, launched by “maynard,” on Lanier’s satirical prophesy for the future of the Net.
Hungry for more? Check the trackbacks or try Technorati’s index of blogs linking to Cato Unbound.
Stay tuned for the informal blog conversation among our panelists (sure to be lively!), and keep the blog posts coming!
January 27th, 2006 at 4:07 am
[...] Our entry on netarchical capitalism, has been picked by a roundup of the blogosphere’s dialogue on Jaron Lanier’s original essay. [...]